


It's Only Rock and Roll (But I Like It)

by victoria_p (musesfool)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Community: spn_flashback, Gen, Music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-14
Updated: 2006-08-14
Packaged: 2018-09-15 10:07:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9230201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musesfool/pseuds/victoria_p
Summary: There is a hiss and a crackle, and then sharp bursts of guitar that hit his ears like gunfire. In that instant, Dean falls in love.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to mousapelli and amberlynne for handholding. Written for spn_flashback - the prompt was _Dean's first mixtape_. Title from the Rolling Stones.

_Side One_

The year Dean turns eleven, he and Sam spend July with Caleb while their dad hunts werewolves in Manitoba. Dean discovers Caleb's record collection in a milk crate in the basement; the tightly packed cardboard sleeves smell of damp and the slick grooved surface of the records shimmer in the early morning sunlight filtering through the small windows, gleaming like a treasure map only he can read.

He waits until Caleb leaves for work and Sam is deeply involved with Nintendo, and then hooks up the old record player that sits beside the Sony receiver Caleb keeps tuned to the all news all the time station. He carries the crate to the living room and pulls out an album that looks interesting--the one with the blimp crashing on the cover--and slides out the record, holding his breath. He lays the disc down and drops the needle.

There is a hiss and a crackle, and then sharp bursts of guitar that hit his ears like gunfire.

In that instant, Dean falls in love.

It's not like he hasn't heard music before, but he's never paid attention until now, never really _listened_. Now, it's like these guys are speaking directly to him, like they _know_ and _understand_.

He lies on the floor and absorbs the music--the relentless drums and throbbing bass reset the rhythm of his heart, and the yowling voice and howling guitar twine together like snakes until he can't tell where one ends and the other begins. Listening to this music--feeling it--he thinks he can fly. He wonders if he could learn to play guitar. (He never asks. He knows the answer would be no.)

He plays album after album--Led Zeppelin, The Who, Janis Joplin--stopping only long enough to make lunch for Sammy. He washes his hands carefully so he doesn't get greasy mayonnaise spots on the vinyl.

He's still lying on the floor, listening (the machine-gun riffs of "All Day and All of the Night" demand repeat listening), when Caleb comes home.

Dean scrambles to his feet, caught, unsure how Caleb will react.

He smiles--not what Dean was expecting--and squats down in front of the crate to flip through the albums. There's room now, since Dean has bunches of them stacked in piles on the floor--the ones he likes, the ones he thinks are okay, and the ones that have blown his mind.

"I haven't listened to some of these in years," Caleb says. "Sure does bring back memories." He pulls one out and says, "Have you listened to this yet? It's your dad's favorite."

Dean takes the record from him and studies the cover. " _Morrison Hotel_ , huh?"

"Yeah."

With careful fingers, he puts the record on the turntable and listens to the driving bass line of the first song.

"The Doors didn't have a bassist," Caleb says. "That's all Ray Manzarek on keyboards."

"Cool." Dean says, as eager to absorb information as music.

Caleb smiles and ruffles his hair. "You know, you could start dubbing these onto tapes, take some of the music with you when you go."

"Could I? Really?"

"We'll buy some tapes tomorrow and you can start."

"Cool."

For the rest of the summer, Dean spends hours at the stereo, dubbing album after album onto cassette. It keeps him out of trouble, gives him something to do on rainy days. He tries to get Sam interested, but Sam just wants to play Nintendo and read.

On a warm August morning, Dad comes back and they pack up their stuff. Dean now has a shoebox full of tapes, from Bad Company to Zeppelin, and when they have pulled away from Caleb's, and are speeding down the highway, windows open to let the wind blow through their hair, he reaches into his box and takes out a tape. He pushes it into the tapedeck and Dad shoots him a curious glance.

There is a slight hiss and crackle, and then "Roadhouse Blues" kicks in.

Dad smiles, bobbing his head in time to the beat. "Good man," he says, and Dean flushes with pride.

*

_Side Two_

Her name is Lisa Locastro and she sits three seats up in the row to Dean's left in Social Studies. Her hair is long and dark, and she wears too much makeup, but at fourteen, Dean doesn't care about that. To him, she is mysterious, exotic. His eyes are inexorably drawn to the pull of her crisp white blouse over her breasts, and the pleats in her kilt--rolled up to show several inches of tanned thigh above her knee, even in the dead of winter--starched knife-sharp and swaying with the motion of her hips when she walks.

"This girl is, she's like the engine in the Impala after Dad tunes it up, or like a John Bonham drum solo," he tells Sam, who wrinkles his nose. Sam is still at the stage where girls are icky--he has no sympathy for Dean's sudden fascination with them.

"She's out of your league," says Tommy Vitale, the kid who sits in front of him in Social Studies, and who also spends most of the class staring at Lisa's legs. "She's got seniors asking her out."

"But she hasn't said yes to any of them," Dean points out.

"She will," Tommy says darkly, and maybe he's right, but Dean likes to think he's got a chance.

Dean always likes to think he's got a chance.

It's true, though. There are always guys waiting by Lisa's locker, guys asking to carry her books and offering her rides home, and he can't compete with that. He doesn't even want to.

Before class one afternoon, she smiles at him and holds up her textbook--there's a Metallica sticker on the front cover that matches the one on his book--and he knows what he's got to do.

He spends hours that night sorting through his tapes, chewing on the end of his pen, scribbling lists of songs, searching for the perfect mix, the right order, the perfect combination of words and music that will tell Lisa everything he thinks and feels about her without him ever having to open up his mouth.

"You've made hundreds of tapes," Sam says, confused, from where he's lying on the couch watching, comic book in his lap. "Why's this one so special?"

"Because this girl is special."

"She's just a girl."

"You'll understand when you're older."

"Whatever."

Dean opens his mouth to answer, but then realizes that a bored Sam is a Sam who'll go do something else for a while and leave him be. Instead, he shrugs a shoulder and turns back to his list.

"Girls don't like Metallica," Sam says, reading over his shoulder.

"This one does."

"That's why she's special?"

"One reason."

"Huh."

Dean bites back a sigh, so Sam can't tell he's bothering him--if he realizes that, he'll never stop--and soon enough, Sam curls up on the couch and starts reading.

*

It takes Dean days to whittle his list of songs down to twenty--some of them are long, so he doesn't think he can fit more than ten on a side.

Once he's got the list, he has to put them in order. He works on instinct, years of listening to albums in the car giving him a sense of how the momentum should build and then ease, how he has to kick it off with something that will make her pay attention, and then keep it for at least forty-five minutes. Ninety if he's lucky.

Though he does spend his money on new albums sometimes, he's used to taping off the radio, and the hair-trigger reflexes Dad's trained into him come in handy when he dubs, though he still occasionally screws up the segues--they need to be smooth, not choppy, each song flowing into the next like it always belonged there, the way "Living Loving Maid" always follows "Heartbreaker," no matter what they did on the box set. They left out some choice stuff on that thing, which leaves him shaking his head, though he's glad to finally have a decent copy of "Hey, Hey What Can I Do." (He doesn't put that on Lisa's tape.)

He opens with "Hello, I Love You," because as much as he pretends he doesn't give a rat's ass about school, he does listen in class (every bit of knowledge may turn out to be useful someday, Dad says, and since Dean listens to Dad, he listens in school), and he remembers that a strong opening statement is important. No second chances to make a first impression, and if the first song isn't kick-ass, Lisa may not listen to the rest.

From there, he segues into "All Day and All of the Night," because the rhythm matches so perfectly. He imagines telling her that Ray Davies sued The Doors _and won_ for stealing that rhythm, and then executing a perfect segue of his own, asking her to go with him to see Metallica (he's sure he can score tickets, if he can just talk Dad into letting him go).

He opts for real Van Halen over that Van Hagar shit, even if it's not the most romantic music ever. He chooses "Running with the Devil," and follows it up with "Wherever I May Roam," two songs that feature heavily in the soundtrack of his life he secretly puts together on long car rides through nowhere towns and cookie-cutter suburbs when Dad lets him pick the music.

He revamps and rearranges the playlist so often that the pages in the back of his Social Studies notebook are full of lists of songs crossed out and rewritten, arrows zigzagging over the page to indicate where he's moved them. When he finally finishes side one, he finds he has about four minutes of tape left--room enough for a whole extra song--which means rearranging everything again, and sorting through the songs he'd discarded on the first go-round until he finally selects "Burning for You" by Blue Oyster Cult. He redubs the last three songs of side one so he can still end it with "Sweet Melissa," because he wants to end on a mellow note.  
  
It's the Monday of spring break week (could be Easter, could be Passover--they don't celebrate either; the Winchesters prefer the dead to remain in their graves, and if the angel of death stopped by, Dean's pretty sure Dad would kick its ass) when Dean finally finishes the tape. He handwrites the track list on the card in blocky black capital letters, as neatly as he can, song name and band name, still pretty impressed with himself for getting the one-two punch of Janis Joplin and Joan Jett onto the middle of side two, because chicks who rock hard kick ass, and he wishes there were more of them.

Side two ends with "Seasons" by Chris Cornell, off the _Singles_ soundtrack, because it sounds like it belongs right after "Going to California," which he'd thought would be the final song, but again, he has tape left over, and he can't leave it blank. Last year for his birthday, Sam had bought him a bunch of that Seattle crap, and Dean had pretended to like it for Sam's sake, and it's kind of grown on him. He isn't about to jump on the whole Nirvana bandwagon or anything, but it doesn't suck as much as he'd thought it would. Soundgarden is pretty cool, though, and Chris Cornell kind of sounds like Robert Plant, and how could that be bad?

He slips the tape into his backpack and finds himself actually wishing for the vacation to end, so he can get back to school and give it to Lisa. He can't decide if he should sneak it into her locker with a note or hand it to her in person, just before class starts, or maybe when it's over, so he can walk her to her next class or something.

As he makes dinner that night, he lets Sammy's chatter wash over him like water while he plays all the scenarios out in his head, trying to decide which has the best chance of getting Lisa to go out with him.

When Dad comes home from a meeting with a hunter he knows over in Fort Lee and says, "Pack up. We're heading south in the morning. There've been some odd disappearances down in the Everglades, and we've been here too long anyway," Dean gapes at him for a long moment, incredulous. "Is there a problem, Dean?"

"No, sir. I just--" He trails off because there is nothing he can say. "No, sir," he repeats after clearing his throat. "We'll be packed." He thwaps Sam on the shoulder. "Come on, Sammy." For once, he hopes Sam whines about it, because sometimes Dad gives in when Sam throws a fit, and Dean doesn't want to leave now. But Sam gets up like the good little soldier Dean usually wants him to be, and heads to the bedroom without a word.

As they pull out into the early morning sunshine, Dean takes Lisa's tape out of the case and puts it in the tapedeck. Might as well enjoy it while he can.

end

*

Lisa's tape:

_Hello, I Love You_

Side one:  
Hello, I Love You - The Doors  
All Day and All of the Night - The Kinks  
You Shook Me All Night Long - AC/DC  
Pour Some Sugar on Me - Def Leppard  
Love in an Elevator - Aerosmith  
Hot Legs - Rod Stewart  
Running with the Devil - Van Halen  
Wherever I May Roam - Metallica  
Burning for You - Blue Oyster Cult  
Beast of Burden - The Rolling Stones  
Sweet Melissa - Allman Brothers

Side two:  
Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin  
Foxy Lady - Jimi Hendrix  
Touch Me - The Doors  
Piece of My Heart - Big Brother and the Holding Co.  
Cherry Bomb - The Runaways  
Sweet Child o'Mine - Guns N' Roses  
Layla - Derek and the Dominos  
Nothing Else Matters - Metallica  
Going to California - Led Zeppelin  
Seasons - Chris Cornell

_April 1993, Dean Winchester_

*

**Author's Note:**

> the song that captures and converts Dean is "Good Times, Bad Times" by Led Zeppelin. Side one, song one of Zeppelin I.


End file.
